30 March 2009

Paul Dano looks weird. With his planar forehead, nubby chin, and inward-sloping face, he resembles a living Daniel Clowes drawing. Naturally, then, he's often cast in oddball roles, like the Nietzschean mealy-mouth of Little Miss Sunshine, the character he channels most in Gigantic. (Rather than, unfortunately, the superiorly seething and serpentine preacher of There Will Be Blood.)

The press notes provided very little information about the filmmakers, so I'll speculate: I imagine they were raised in a bona fide Squaresville, U.S.A., where cheerleaders and football players told them they were strange and they eventually came to believe it, to define themselves proudly by it. So now they've made this, a movie about eccentrics whose sole function is to be eccentric because, in a romantic Sundancer like this, being eccentric is a virtue in and of itself—old bullies be damned.

27 March 2009

Monsters vs. Aliens turns on that old narrative cliché about using bad guys to battle even worse guys. Sometimes...it takes a thief to catch a thief. That's what those pre-Hannibal Hannibal Lecter stories are about; also, Ghostbusters. Most of all, though, this film reminded me of The Incredibles — just stripped of all the humor (not even the kids were laughing, just the doofus dad behind me), big ideas, and character development, leaving behind the action set pieces designed to be the levels in the requisite video game — which the Pixar film had in unfortunate abundance, too. Sometimes I feel like I'm playing the movie, a sensation bolstered a bit by the 3D.

We Pedal Uphill collects 13 vignettes—one for each red and white stripe—about life in these Disunited States, from 2001–2008. Each story, set in a different state, from Massachusetts to Oklahoma, is a Bush-era tale of fear, racism, homophobia, corruption and treason. Conspicuously, it’s a low-budget labor of outrage, so we can forgive the theatrical acting styles, even the earnestness of its lefty politics. But it’s harder to forgive the film’s timing; it has arrived too late.

26 March 2009

Like the upcoming exercise in sci-fi camp, Alien Trespass, The Perfect Sleep is an empty homage to a bygone genre. Several genres, in fact: It's a kung-fu noir with a modern machine-gun mobster movie twist. If that sounds like fun, it's not.) Writer Anton Pardoe stars as the Narrator, a snide mutterer who has come back to town after a decade or so in exile to clean up a lifetime's worth of messes in a matter of hours; many people with exotic names have to die for reasons that are unclear, or at least unconvincing. Too frequently, I had little idea what was happening or who certain characters were, but the gist seems to be something about the children of enemy gangsters who have grown up to be enemy gangster-types themselves, with a heap of mommy and daddy issues to work out.

19 March 2009

Taken is a knuckleheaded action movie about kidnapping and sex slavery. Or, Taken is a subversive thriller about girls gone wild and American hegemony. Or, both. Channeling Ra's Al Ghul more than Oskar Schindler, Liam Neeson plays a retired kung fu spook who infantilizes his 17-year-old daughter: he dozes off watching home movies of her fifth birthday party; he orders her milkshakes with—wait for it—extra cherries. (!!!) So he’s reluctant to let her leave the country because he knows first hand how dangerous the world is for young women. In an early scene, moonlighting as a security guard, he saves the life of a Shakira-esque singer, disarming (with his bare hands) a backstage assassin wielding a phallic knife.

Who’s next? Tout de France! His daughter (Maggie Grace, slightly less insufferable here than on Lost) wants to stay in Paris for the summer, but he’s uneasy about allowing her to leave the manufactured safety of America. For good reason, too—sex traffickers move in on her the minute, literally, she steps foot out of Charles de Gaulle. That is, the moment she leaves home, she starts doing drugs and doing dudes. From his perspective, she’s your typical American coed—but not if he can help it. The abduction scene is suspenseful, the work of a true movie craftsman; if nothing else, Taken is expertly paced, smartly sticking exclusively to the fists-and-fury Neeson once the story properly begins. But as a result, it feels absurdly plotted. (Really, she can’t get further than the taxi stand?) It turns out, though, that that preposterousness is not a weakness we must forgive or overlook; instead, it serves as a clue: what you’re seeing on-screen is meant as a joke. Taken has a subtle satirical underside.

Neeson, in full-on glower mode for most of the film, is a parody, how the mostly French filmmakers imagine that Americans see themselves. If he has to, to save his spawn, he “will tear down the Eiffel Tower.” He nearly does, leaving a trail of dead bodies, traffic jams and property damage in his wake as he rips through makeshift hovels filled with doped-up sex slaves, engaging in gun fights and car chases. (He still finds time to pause and criticize arrogant Albanian immigrants for taking advantage of a tolerant French system.) Arrests are for pussies, i.e. Euros—everybody dies, and there’s no pity for the dead. A young white woman’s virginity is at stake! In fairness, it’s almost impossible to fault Neeson: the men he kills are (indirectly) raping his fucking daughter. Should he write a strongly worded letter to the consulate?

But that’s a part of the gag: his unassailable rectitude feels like an exaggerated view of our Bush-era selves, viewed through a glass Frenchly. Americans, of course, only fight just battles overseas, fully cloaked in the black-and-white righteousness of the red-white-and-blue flag. At one point, Neeson shoots an innocent woman just to make a point, and it’s here that he gets harder to like. He becomes out of control, a symbol of unchecked American power run rampant “over there”. The filmmakers go farther still: Once he unravels the sex trade conspiracy, he discovers not only the complicity of one of our allies’ governments (though not a member of the coalition of the willing, of course), he finds an American at the center of the ring, judging from the man’s accent, who lectures Neeson on the supremacy of money and business. This is a ballsy detail for multiplex fare: the Americans’ true enemy is not only capitalism—it’s themselves. Grade: B+

Produced for French television, La Belle Personne is “like a French Gossip Girl,” B.A.M.’s programmer said before a recent screening. About the drama queens (and kings) in a high school, the movie revolves around teachers sleeping with teachers, students sleeping with students, and students sleeping with teachers. (It’s that last one, presumably, that makes this the French Gossip Girl.) Eschewing the gritty authenticity of the recent French high school flick The Class, Honoré’s film instead embraces the style of the American primetime soap opera. It’s more CW than Canal Plus, and there’s nothing wrong with that—in theory, anyway.

For a filmmaker with a proven potential for playfulness, I expected Honoré would have a bit of fun working within this youthful milieu. His Dans Paris, released in the U.S. in 2007, exhibited exhilaratingly free-spirited moviemaking: characters spoke without moving their lips, addressed the audience, spontaneously broke into song. But here the director treats the material with a sour puss, as though he were a bummed-out high schooler himself. Though it boasts a few strong, if small, moments—such as a tracking shot that follows a note as it travels across a classroom—Honoré’s film presents every one of its interpersonal dramas as an end-of-the-world crisis. One kid is driven to suicide.

Really? I mean, for a director to take high school so seriously can be commendable, as it accurately reflects the lives of the characters. But if you’re not going to be campy about it, it’s necessary to include an overarching adult perspective, if not in the tone than at least among the cast, as the audience knows (or ought to, anyway) that high school is a lot less important than it seems at the time. The grown-ups here, however—particularly frequent collaborator Louis Garrel, as a ravishing Italian teacher with a fondness for dark-haired, teenage Godardian beauties—are worse than the kids, histrionically hung up on puppy love. (That said, the gloomy Nick Drake tunes that make up much of the soundtrack work quite well.) The same self-seriousness that suffocated the second-half of Honoré’s last film, Love Songs, smothers this film from beginning to end. Well, nearly the end: La Belle Personne finds its verve close to its close, with a comic stalking passage (perhaps an homage to In the City of Sylvia?) and a race through the streets and parks of Paris, set to a baroque harpsichord. Honoré would do well to lighten up like this more often, to abandon chronicling lovelorn characters consumed with straight-faced melodrama. Dourness alone does not become him. Grade: C+

18 March 2009

Shall We Kiss?, a deceptively airy romance, is a love story in love with stories, a work of art in love with art. Packed with rich orchestral music and classical paintings, it unfolds by folding in on itself: two strangers (Julie Gayet and Michaël Cohen), both in committed relationships, meet in Nantes and share an enchanted evening, but she won’t kiss him goodnight and goodbye — what he calls “a kiss of no consequence”. Instead, she tells him a story about two friends of hers (Virginie Ledoyen and writer-director Mouret) who kissed and lived to regret it, in order to prove that all kisses have consequences.

Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd), a high-end real estate agent — they must have started filming before the collapse of the housing market? — dreams of taking the commission from the sale of the Lou Ferrigno Estate and buying an empty lot in a questionable neighborhood so he can build retail and residential units; that is, he dreams of being a gentrifier and an over-developer. He and his fiancée each have a car; his is an SUV. In his spare time, he golfs. (And fences — like, with an epee.) He’s like a less-developed version of Annette Bening in American Beauty, except director Hamburg (Along Came Polly) plays him as the to-be-sympathized-with hero, even though he’s an irritating schmuck.

Now is not the time to venerate kings. As the global economy crumbles, the documentary Valentino: The Last Emperor arrives malapropos to celebrate affluence and excess. The movies have historically offered recession audiences a glimpse of how the better-off half lives, but this film serves less as Astaire-Rogers-style escapism than as an object of outrage, bound to generate more socialists than new devotees of Italian stitching. At the time of filming, from 2005 to 2007, Valentino Garavani, known to the world by his first name alone, was arguably the last of the classic haute couture fashion designers. (He has since retired.)

06 March 2009

Within the first 20 minutes of We Own the Night, an artful, strong-arming genre picture, writer-director Gray introduces a copious number of contrasts: nightclubs and church basements, Puerto Ricans and Russians, Blondie and Louis Prima, weedheads and drunks, and—above all others—dealers and cops. Efficient and deceptively potboiled, the movie turns on an old narrative archetype, a contrast as old as God and the Devil: the good brother and the bad brother, seen as long ago as, uh, The Bible (Cain v. Abel) and as recently as Slumdog Millionaire.

Here, the good brother is Mark Wahlberg, an upstanding police captain who obeyingly followed in the footsteps of patriarch Robert Duvall, assistant police chief. The thrillingly talented Joaquin Phoenix plays the black sheep sibling, a prodigal nightclub manager who has forsaken the law-and-order respectability of his family for more Bacchanal pursuits—which include the voluptuous Eva Mendes, so who can blame him? (Phoenix is so alienated from his family that he has taken to using his dead mother’s maiden name, Green—i.e. a color, beginning with “GR” no less, which makes him a likely, if fantasized, stand-in for the director.) Set in 1988 in the Coney-Brighton sections of Brooklyn, We Own the Night features a city falling apart (says Wahlberg) on the brink of war (says Duvall) between the police and the dope peddlers. Phoenix is caught in the middle, with connections to both but complicity in neither. The war quickly arrives in a third reel act of violence, forcing side-choosing that transforms Phoenix from playful to brooding, reducing him from insouciant night owl to morose, mumbling informant.

There’s nothing very fresh about We Own the Night on paper. An elemental clash between Good and Evil, it deals in black-and-white morality, going so far as to posit joining The Force as a religious calling, requiring the renunciation of women and all. (But, but…Eva!) Gray, though, has a knack for taking old hats and haberdashing new brims. (?) Deftly paced and plotted, it’s a B-movie impeccably executed with a style no less than Kubrickian, from graceful dissolves to elegantly lighted frames—creamy hotel- and apartment-interiors; amber, lamplit discotheques. Though it stumbles some in its second hour, We Own the Night is underpinned by a handful of masterful, violent set-pieces: a mid-film visit to a drug den, steeped in nearly unbearable suspense; a car chase and gun battle through the streets of Queens in cats-and-dogs rain; and a manhunt through conflagrant reeds in Floyd Bennett Field. (Gray has a true New Yorker’s sense of the city, setting his films in off-the-tourist-path locations, outerboroughs and all.) If every mainstream movie had such a skillful hand behind it, we wouldn’t so often have to draw a contrast of our own, between the good and the shamelessly commercial. Grade: A-

05 March 2009

Some movies spend their stint on the festival circuit growing stale. But Tokyo Sonata, which screened last May at Cannes and last October at the New York Film Festival, has only gotten timelier along its journey; its limited theatrical run now lands, serendipitously, in the midst of the worst economic climate in generations. The film examines various systems’ mechanisms of dissolution — how families disintegrate, how violence spreads, how systems fail together. At its forefront, though, is the collapse of an economy. As the film opens, Ryûhei (Teruyuki Kagawa), husband, father and administrator, loses his job to outsourcing; he subsequently spends his days choking down free meals with hobos and keeping his unemployment a secret from the wife and kids. This might sound tired: Laurent Cantet studied a similar situation in 2001’s Time Out; The Simpsons did it in 2007. But director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) uses the scenario to explore issues beyond the pressures of joblessness.

To call Megane a trifling lark would be accurate, if unfairly diminishing. About a woman staying at an oceanside retreat, the calm and calming film’s sauntering, sand-bogged rhythms are as soothing as a holiday’s; to take in Megane is to take a quick vacation, or at least enjoy a lazy day: its scenes — taking a walk, having a bite, watching the surf, playing Reversi, strumming a mandolin — have the effect of basking in a springtime sun, teetering on the hypnagogic brink of a nap.